The Following article originated at and
is taken from DiscoverTheNetworks.com

With 1.6 million
members, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME) is one of the largest unions in the
AFL-CIO. Mostly representing workers in local and state government
and in the health-care industry, AFSCME is one of the few unions to
have continually increased its membership since its inception. Under
the leadership of Gerald McEntee, AFSCME has been instrumental in
transforming labor into a progressive outfit.

AFSCME was founded
in 1936. During the late 1930s and 40s, its membership
grew to more than 50,000 people and it lobbied primarily for
civil-service laws based on merit. In the 1950s, AFSCME began to
shift its priorities toward collective bargaining, which was illegal
for the vast majority of public employees.

During this period
of development, Jerry Wurf emerged as the leader to guide the union
to prominence and influence. From 1947 to 1964, Wurf worked
as an organizer for the AFSCME local, District Council 37, in New
York City and was able to increase its membership from 1,000 to
38,000. This dramatic rise was due to Wurf’s push to legalize
collective bargaining for public employees. In 1958, his campaign
resulted in Mayor Robert Wagner recognizing collective bargaining as
a right for public employees. Wagner’s Executive Order 49 became the
model for President Kennedy’s 1962 Order granting organizing rights
to a wide range of federal employees.

Wurf became
AFSCME’s President in 1964, at which time the union had 220,000
members. By the time Wurf died in 1981, AFSCME's membership had
grown to approximately 1 million. Wurf had developed the union into
one of the most powerful in America and had also steered it
politically leftward with his fierce criticism of the Vietnam
War. It was Gerald McEntee, however, who instituted AFSCME’s
definitive shift towards progressivism when he succeeded Wurf as the
union’s President. McEntee aligned himself with the most powerful
players in the New Labor movement: John Sweeney,
Andrew Stern, and Steven Rosenthal (co-founder of
America Coming Together, which represented AFSCME in the
Government Union wing of the
Shadow Party).

In 1995, the year
of Sweeney’s election as AFL CIO President, McEntee became chairman
of the AFL-CIO’s political committee and helped to guide the liberal
federation into a new era of progressive labor. McEntee also
employed Paul Booth -- radical union activist, former New Leftist,
former national secretary of the
Students for a
Democratic Society, and co-founder of the
Midwest Academy -- as his assistant. Booth, who had previously
trained radicals to infiltrate the labor movement, was now able to
inundate a much vaster labor arena, heading the AFL-CIO’s "Union
Summer" training camp, a 10-week educational internship where
participants are indoctrinated in radical ideology, developing
"skills useful for union organizing drives and other campaigns for
workers' rights and social justice." (Today, Booth is McEntee's
executive assistant at AFSCME.)

From his position
of power, McEntee has ensured AFSCME’s absolute support for the
Democratic Party as well as its partnership with America
Votes. Between 1990 and 2010, AFSCME alone
donated $42 million -- 98
percent to Democrats -- and it remains the leading union
contributor to the Party. It has not contributed to a single
conservative or moderate GOP candidate on the national level since
the 1992 elections.

Many questions have
surrounded McEntee’s role in funneling such vast sums of money into
political causes. During the
Bill Clinton
administration, McEntee
was
implicated in Teamstergate, an illegal funding operation in
which at least $1 million was laundered by
Project Vote, Citizen Action, the National Council of Senior
Citizens, Teamsters for a Corruption-Free Union, the AFL-CIO, and
the
Democratic Party itself.

In order to
increase its membership, AFSCME has also waged numerous
card-check campaigns and found other ways of gaining membership
through backroom deals and stealth strategies. In the state of
Washington, for example, AFSCME
helped the Democrats gain full control of the legislature in
2002. Democrats, in turn, lifted collective bargaining restrictions
from state employees and, within three years, unions were able to
double their membership by targeting government workers. With the
huge increase in dues, moreover, the unions doubled their political
donations to the Democratic Party.

During the
2010 election-campaign season, AFSCME made $2.2 million in
political contributions, with only $6,000, or 0.3 percent, going to
Republicans; recipients of AFSCME's donations included 339 House and
Senate Democrats, and only 3 Republicans - all from the center-left
coalition of the party.